This much we know: the politics of recession will be different. Now Britain's economy is shrinking, and with the Cassandras of the City and the Bank of England ever shriller, all the main parties are going to have to change their tune. Labour's "no more boom or bust" is busted. The Tories' blithe "hello sun, hello clouds" optimism now seems vacuous. And even the Lib Dems may be regretting their lurch to the right.

The saga of Oleg Deripaska and his friends is about as good an image of politicians misjudging the mood of the times as we will ever get. He is part of a swaggering, plutocratic, super-rich elite whose protectors in the Kremlin are now a menace from the Caucasus to the Balkans, and to every EU country dependent on Russian gas. He might be a billionaire, but he's had his US visa revoked. No Labour politician, no Tory, no self-respecting British establishment figure, should have gone within a million miles of him.

The damage done goes far beyond a startling lapse of judgment by George Osborne and Peter Mandelson. People everywhere in Britain are really suffering. It's bad and rapidly getting worse. Businesses are going under. Money is still not coming through from the banks. Jobs are being lost. Families are desperately reassessing their weekly budgets. Houses that were their only capital are sliding in value. And, more important, there is a cold atmosphere of fear stalking the country - fear of what is to come and how bad it might be.

At this time, to read about the high jinks and purring private conversations of a Russian tycoon, an Old Etonian hedge-fund manager with an old name, Lord Mandelson and Bullingdon Club George, is almost intolerable. They might object that they were the victims of hideously bad timing - when the tryst on the yacht and the meal in the taverna took place, the full reality of the global economic crisis had not emerged, and Mandelson had not been summoned back to government.

Yet that's not really the point, is it? This story reminds ordinary people how power worked during the long boom of the past decade, the smug summits at Davos, the private chalets, helicopters, jets and yachts, the close contacts between various Murdochs and subservient politicians and lately, the Russians. Money ripped out of Russia has been sluiced into European hidey-holes, and the people elected to represent us have gone along and ogled.

I don't know whether Osborne will "survive" further probing about his office finances and the Rothschild connection. I don't know whether Mandelson will keep his place in cabinet if European investigations into his business links come up with more questions. I do know that the shadow chancellor has lost the authority he built up after his tax ambush on Gordon Brown. He will be judged more harshly and listened to less intently from now on. Similarly, all those who felt, "let's give Mandelson another look, wipe the slate clean, offer him a fresh chance" will shrug, grimace and turn away.

The harder questions are for the party leaders. First, Labour. We should remain sceptical about Brown's bounce in the polls. This looks like a bad recession and leaders are rarely thanked for those. Callaghan and Healey took tough, drastic action in 1977-78 and were rewarded with a thundering defeat at Thatcher's hands. Major and Ken Clarke did their level best to sort things out in the last recession and saw Tony Blair stride easily into power a year later. The overwhelming likelihood is that Labour will be punished in a similar way.

Brown and Alistair Darling have acted decisively to help the banks. They have not properly responded to the Tory attack on the level of state borrowing accumulated under Labour. Nor have they been honest about fiscal pain to come. Better to counter-attack strongly, to defend the increases in health and education spending, and ask for chapter and verse about which projects the Tories opposed at the time. And why, if Labour were being so profligate, have the Conservatives decided to stick with their spending for two years to come?

Labour's core economic message has to be ruthlessly populist: the pain should not be visited on the poor, or the struggling middle. If anyone is to hurt more, it has to be the rich, and the big corporations. The merest suspicion of the super-rich getting away with it would be politically lethal. From Mandelson there has to be contrition, not defiance. If he can't manage that, he should go - yet again.

The Tories have difficult questions too. Have they junked their green credentials in their panic about the economy; and if so, what distinguishes them from old Thatcherites? Can they find a more sober, less jeering tone to go with the new times? David Cameron has to play a different kind of politics. Hard choices about tax and spending are itemised and explained, not vaguely alluded to. Then there's Europe. With the pound falling so fast, and with much of the hope for recovery focused on pan-European action, is now really the time to be calling for an anti-EU referendum?

For the Lib Dems, it might be time to reopen the case for joining the euro. Faced with economic and energy problems, and a more militant Russia, and perhaps encouraged by a re-energised, more liberal US, this is a time for Europeans to act together. As the economic storm rages, narrow nationalism will be less relevant, though for many it may be more tempting. Under Nick Clegg the third party has seemed less distinctive just when a different perspective is needed most.

Yet millions will be looking for more still. We have been led into a world in which only a rampaging market system is considered respectable and where dull-eyed consumerism is reckoned the only safe measurement of human happiness. Fellowship, comradeship, fairness and the pressing need for more sustainable ways of living have all been shoved into the margins of public debate.

Of course, the immediate crisis has to be weathered. But if ever there was time for a rethinking of values, it is now. Let's debate the successes as well as the mistakes - the light-regulation, light-tax treatment of the super rich and the acceptance of a growth-at-all-costs, fly-more, drive-more economy. After turbo-charged capitalism, don't we need at the very least a spell of quieter, more moderate capitalism? These are unfamiliar waters for politicians who have grown up in the good times. Dangerous, too. But not half as dangerous as the murky, polluted seas round Russian yachts.